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The bed itself. It was an old and simple oaken four-poster bed, covered with red sheets. In the simply decorated white room, this bed gave it a feeling of a monk’s room—a feeling helped along by the crucifix, an insistence of Lily’s, that hung on the wall above the center of the headboard.

Regina set the cup of chicken broth on the side table and returned to her chair at the foot of the bed. Larry was shivering, despite the stifling warmth of the room. I watched Lily set her rosary in a clicking pile of beads on the bedside table, right beside the cup of broth and Larry’s teeth in the glass of water. Then she took off her dress. In front of everyone, without so much as a sidelong glance in our direction, she struggled out of her dress, lifting the dark blue and white polka-dotted garment up and over her head. She shirked it from her body and onto the floor. Then she climbed into the bed beside Larry. Larry’s feverish head turned toward her as she got into the bed. She scooted toward him beneath the red sheet, and Larry let his body crumble into hers, into her arms. And she held him. She took the dying old toothless chimp into her arms and pressed his head against her furry chest. She lay with him there in that bed beside him, embracing him, waiting with him for the life to leave his body, the pressure and warmth of her body easing his passage into death.

Clever looked at me, and our eyes met, and, I following his lead, we respectfully left the room. Regina and Lydia followed. Hilarious Larry died shortly thereafter. Peacefully, in his sleep, with Lily lying beside him. Actually, I have no idea whether or not his death was peaceful. All we know is that he died in his sleep. He had already passed away by the time the veterinarian arrived. We should not have sent for the vet, but for the priest.

For some reason the image of Larry’s deathbed hauntingly remains burned into my memory like a scorch that lingers in the vision from looking too long at the sun. And I mean the bed itself, the thing in which he had slept during his decade of retirement at the Lawrence Ranch. Think about the bed. It is a symbol of both birth and death. A bed is a lucky thing to be born in, and it is an even luckier thing in which to die. I suppose it is a blessing to have a death as quiet as Larry’s. It fit him. He was a creature of proud stoic resignation. I suppose that was why he was not afraid to die. Even if I manage to die in a bed, Gwen—which I suspect at this point I will—I do not expect my death to be like his. I am no Socrates, nor even a Hilarious Larry. I know I will not die with such peaceful bravery and grace. I know that I am a coward, and I will probably die like a coward, in the same way we are all wrested from the womb in the first place: kicking and screaming. I am afraid of death. I fear it and I hate it. I hate death because I love life. It’s a morbid irony that an excess of love for life often leads one to a life dogged with fear and anger. Larry was not like that. He embraced death like a man reunited after a long separation with a childhood friend. Born in the jungle, raised in the circus, he died in a human house, in a bed. He turned his back on life and died himself a soft, domestic, taciturn death, not in his boots, but in his slippers. I cannot imagine myself doing that—at least not in the way he did it. Those who love life, who truly love it, love it to the point of jealousy, of rage, of sickness, of possessiveness and obsession—those who love life the most cannot help but be cowards. I suspect that I will die a violent and cowardly death, like a lover, even if I have to do it, like a lover, in bed.

There was a small funeral for Hilarious Larry several days later. His widow, Hilarious Lily, insisted on a Catholic service, even though Larry himself had never been a believer. It hardly matters: funerals are for the living. The service for him was held at the Sacred Heart of Mary Cathedral in Montrose. It was an old church, a rarity in